26 Part One: Texts and Contexts
doomed to fail. The trite maxim “ad fontes” also holds true in this particular
instance. If we want to understand Byzantine poetry, let us above all listen to
the Byzantines themselves.
If the evocative anecdote about al-Mutanabbi’s line and the emperor’s
negative response to it implicitly teaches us an important lesson, it is that any
text, whether in Arabic, Byzantine Greek or another language, needs a context
to be fully understood. Context is a vague concept. It includes anything
relevant to the text one is reading, but which is not expressed in so many words
and is therefore not entirely self-evident. It involves a number of questions:
when, where, by whom, for which audience, what genre, at which occasion, for
which purpose, and so forth. In this chapter I shall discuss three contextual
aspects of Byzantine poetry: the function of the epigram, the relation between
poets and patrons, and the forms of literary communication between poets and
public.
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The Byzantine Epigram
The Souda presents the following explanation of the term “epigram”: “all
texts that are inscribed on some object, even if they are not in verse, are called
™p5gramma”^15. It is rather surprising that the Souda, or the ancient source from
which it culled this information, niggardly sticks to the etymology of the term
and does not refer to the literary genre. This is all the more surprising because
the lexicographers of the Souda made extensive use of the anthology of
Cephalas and must therefore have known perfectly well what an ancient
epigram was like. Whenever the Souda quotes a few verses of an epigram from
Cephalas’ anthology, the text is invariably introduced by the standard
formula: ™n to¦ß ™pigr1mmasin^16. Therefore the question arises: why does the
Souda define the ™p5gramma as an “inscription”, whereas elsewhere it uses the
same term in connection with the literary texts found in the anthology of
Cephalas?
(^15) ADLER 1928–38: II, 352, no. 2270: ™p5grammaº p1nta t2 ™pigraóömen1 tisi, kÌn më ™n m6troiß
eœrhm6na, ™pigr1mmata l6getai. See also the definition in the L6xeiß ½htorika5, ed. I.
BEKKER, Anecdota Graeca, I. Lexica Segueriana. Berlin 1814, 260, 7, and in the Etymo-
logicum Magnum, ed. TH. GAISFORD. Oxford 1848 (repr. Amsterdam 1962), 358, 23:
™p5grammaº oW pefoò kaò Çmmetroi lögoi ™pigr1mmata kalo ̄ntai.
(^16) See CAMERON 1993: 294.